Word: talibanize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Afghanistan - the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win - has become an aimless absurdity. It began with a specific target. Afghanistan was where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda lived, harbored by the Islamic extremist Taliban government. But the enemy escaped into Pakistan, and for the past seven years, Afghanistan has been a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces that we continue to call the "Taliban." These ragtag bands are funded by opium profits and led by assorted religious extremists and druglords, many of whom have safe havens...
...perfect metaphor for the broader war. The soldiers from NATO's International Security Assistance Force are doing what they can against difficult odds. The language and tactics of counter-insurgency warfare are universal here: secure the population, help them build their communities. There are occasional victories: the Taliban leader of Musa Qala, in northern Helmand, switched sides and has become an effective local governor. But the incremental successes are reversible - schools are burned by the Taliban, police officers are murdered - because of a monstrous structural problem that defines the current struggle in Afghanistan...
...British troops in Helmand are fighting with both hands tied behind their backs. They cannot go after the leadership of the Taliban - still led by the reclusive Mullah Omar - which operates openly in the Pakistani city of Quetta, just across the border. They also can't go after the drug trade that funds the insurgency, in part because some of the proceeds are also skimmed by the friends, officials and perhaps family members of the stupendously corrupt government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Helmand province is mostly desert, but it produces half the world's opium supply along a narrow...
...mission used to be - to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and destroy his al-Qaeda command. But once bin Laden slipped away, the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation - building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government. There was a certain logic to that. The Taliban and al-Qaeda can't base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions. The tribes have...
...chose to coddle Pakistan's military leadership, which promised to help in the fight against al-Qaeda - but it hasn't helped much, although there are signs that the fragile new government of President Asif Ali Zardari may be more cooperative. Still, the Pakistani intelligence service helped create the Taliban and other Islamic extremist groups - including the terrorists who attacked Mumbai - as a way of keeping India at bay, and Pakistan continues to protect the Afghan Taliban in Quetta. In his initial statements, Obama has seemed more sophisticated about Afghanistan than Bush. In an interview with me in late October...